Fordham Women Dust Off Their Dancing Shoes

Three years after the Fordham women's basketball team set an NCAA record by finishing 0-29 in the 2007-08 season, Stephanie Gaitley agreed to be the Rams' coach. She came from Monmouth University, where her team had just won 23 games.

People thought she was crazy.

"I saw so much potential in Fordham," Gaitley said this week. "It really intrigued me. I couldn't understand why they didn't win."

In just three seasons, Gaitley has willed the Fordham women to reach that potential. After going 12-18 in her first season, she led the Rams to a 26-9 mark last year, including the school's first postseason victories since 1980. This season the Rams are 25-7 and the Atlantic 10 Conference tournament champions. On Saturday they will take on California their first NCAA tournament game in 20 years.

Gaitley may not have been around for the 0-29 campaign, but she says it still comes up from time to time. "I just look at it as nothing but positive," she said. "It speaks to how the kids have transformed the program."

Gaitley, 54, a former star player at Villanova, has coached for 28 years at five colleges, amassing 527 career wins. She, too, has suffered setbacks. In 2001, she was fired from her decade-long coaching job at St. Joseph's in Philadelphia after a player accused her of ignoring accusations of sexual harassment against Gaitley's husband. (She consistently denied the allegations.)

After moving on to Long Island University, she became interested in the job at Fordham, but said "the timing from both sides wasn't working." Instead the school hired Cathy Andruzzi, a hard-driving Staten Island native. But Andruzzi's teams won only 31 of 147 games, and she stepped down in 2011, opening the door again for Gaitley.

Gaitley had to start from scratch at Fordham. She remembered every player's birthday. She made sure to celebrate all of the team's smaller accomplishments. The Rams won 12 games.

"She came in and laid it on the line and said, 'I'm going to treat you like my daughters,'" said Abigail Corning, a senior guard from Wethersfield, Conn. "She was just really honest with us, but she was demanding at the same time."

Gaitley, who has three sons of her own, didn't just bring her determination from Monmouth to Fordham. She also brought a talented player: Erin Rooney, a guard from Christchurch, New Zealand. Rooney decided to go to Monmouth, in part, because she could study neuroscience, a major not offered by Fordham at the time.

But she learned from an academic adviser at Fordham that the university planned to add the major (which it did this year), so Rooney transferred after two seasons at Monmouth. A 5-foot-8-inch guard, she led the Rams in scoring, assists and rebounds this season.

Eager to turn the program around quickly, Gaitley began her second season at Fordham with a new slogan: "Tradition Begins Now." The Rams went 26-9, the school's first winning season since 1995, and lost by one point to her old team, St. Joseph's, in the A-10 championship game.

But after so many futility, the skeptics weren't buying it. "Even though we got to the championship game last year, there were a lot of people questioning us," Rooney said.

This year, Gaitley's slogan is "Passion With a Purpose," but it might as well be "Nobody Scores." Rooney said the Rams spend at least half of each practice working on defense: "The smallest things that a lot of coaches don't even think about," she said. The Rams have allowed only 41.3 points a game.

"We play against a lot of teams that have the 'passion' part of it, diving on the floor," Rooney said, "but there has to be a part of the game where you're calm and composed."

Fordham lost two of its first three games this season, including a 77-64 loss at Hofstra. "We took them for granted," Corning said. "It was just kind of an eye-opener for us."

Gaitley said, "It really challenged the kids. From that point on, we played better defensively and won 12 straight games."

Even with its 25 wins and a conference tournament title, Fordham, from the mid-major Atlantic 10, earned a No. 10 seed in the NCAA tournament. The team is in Waco, Texas, to take on seventh-seeded California (21-9), which is coming off two straight losses. Should the Rams win, they are likely to play No. 2 seed Baylor in the round of 32 on Monday.

At practice on Thursday before leaving for Waco, Gaitley had made the slogan "Expect to Win." The last time the Rams played an NCAA tournament game, in 1994 against Penn State, they lost by 53 points.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.